Back in 2019, after almost a decade on the apps, I raised venture capital to build and launch my own dating app, Chorus, an attempt to remedy the horror show that online dating had become. I was proud of what we built—a more human, community-based approach—but for various reasons, including the money required to compete with Match Group, as well as Meta continuously suppressing our ads, we folded after a few years. In the time since, the apps have only gotten worse. Much worse.

It’s funny that back then I thought it was as bad as it could get. At that time online dating had just surpassed friends as the number one way people met their partners. This was a big deal! It went in the pitch deck! For the first time, online dating was the norm. Now it’s hard to imagine a world where that wasn’t the case.

My generation—hovering awkwardly between Gen Xers and millennials—exists in the intersection between earnestly dating without technology and completely and utterly relying on it. I started online dating back in 2011 when the word “tinder” referred to flammables, Match was known as Match.com, and most people believed that online dating was still reserved for the socially inept. I was twenty-nine.

Up until that point, what “dating” entailed was an abstract concept I’d absorbed from old movies. My generation did not date. We “met up.” Meet-ups involved texting your romantic interest around midnight on your flip phone to coordinate a meeting spot close enough to one of your apartments—both convenient but inconspicuous—while your friends hovered at a nearby bar so you had other options.

This system had its flaws. Namely, a heavy reliance on alcohol, complete ambiguity when it came to intentions, and the need for an almost meditative commitment to going with the flow. But there was a saving grace to it all too. A beauty that, like most good things, didn’t reveal itself until it was gone.

Despite the ambiguity of the meet-up itself, you were generally meeting people you’d crossed paths with in real life. Most often at parties, events, places where there was some mutual connection between you and the other person. Because of this, there was always some level of accountability between you and your romantic interest. In other words, if you were terrible, people would hear about it.

Accountability was the big old gift horse we all looked in the big old pre-app mouth. It wasn’t that accountability ensured that people weren’t breaking hearts willy-nilly—every generation has some version of that—but it did ensure that people at least treated one another like human beings.

It’s hard to imagine now, but when online dating first started, we mindlessly inherited this accountability practice. We treated each other like people. It didn’t occur to us not to. Rejection was delivered in the form of a bad excuse or a total lie, but not replying to someone at all—completely ignoring a person—was rare. If we didn’t click, we made something up and continued our search using a modified filter. This combination of unambiguous dates and personal accountability came close to romantic Narnia. It was all so exciting—so civil.

What none of us realized was that the accountability we afforded one another was nothing but a grandfathered-in habit, a relic from another time, completely futile when it came to the anonymity of the internet. With online dating there were typically no common friends, nothing tethering this new person to your world. They were an icon. You could make them disappear.

Soon, apps replaced desktop, browsing became swiping. Choosing a date no longer involved reading paragraphs about said person; now, we made an almost animalistic split-second judgment, flattening people to a single image. Instead of going to pains to compose thoughtful messages poking at a particular detail in their profile, we all just tossed out “heys” and hoped for the best. Between the laziness in follow-through and the fact that, chances were, one of us would likely disappear without a trace anyway, the whole charade snowballed into one big ball of apathy.

This apathy has been snowballing for about eight years. It’s become untenable.

A lasting connection requires, in some sense, the impression of scarcity, that the person you’re with is a rare find, something special. And dating apps dull if not remove that impression entirely. There is no incentive to treat the other person with respect—we un-match without a second though, cease contact without explanation. Dating apps don’t create these dynamics, but they certainly exacerbate them.

When I folded my dating app, I began working on a novel about the apps, which comes out from Harper Collins in TWO WEEKS. It’s called Nothing Serious because that was the rejection I most commonly received: “I’m not looking for anything serious.” Which, to be fair, is better than being ghosted outright, but also gets at the heart of the problem. The increasing disinterest in serious commitment on the apps is largely fostered by the overwhelming increase in what we perceive as endless options.

One thing I was particularly interested in was how different the experience was for me in my late thirties (a miserable, perpetual time suck) vs. my male friends of the same age who seemed to have their pick of outstanding, available women. The novel explores the inequities in online dating for heterosexual men and women, especially at and after thirty-five, the age that women often feel increasing pressure to have kids and men often learn to lean into the power inherent in not having the same biological constraint. In addition to this dynamic, there’s another factor or at play. As women get older, our cultural value (at least in a culture, like ours, obsessed with women’s youth) tends to decline, while our own value of ourselves often increases. In other words, we become more confident and self-assured, expecting more for ourselves and from a partner, while the options available are often reduced.

I’m in my forties now, and most of my single women friends have stopped dating entirely. This makes perfect sense to me. It’s not that I no longer believe in love. I think and hope there’s a chance it can happen to all of us. But if one had to trek through a forest of bears for the possible chance at love when the alternative was building a nice home of your own and not getting eaten by bears? I mean, I’d stay where I was. Online dating is not death, but, also, it’s not not death. There is a certain demise of the soul that comes from continuously putting yourself out there, the small specks of hope followed by boulders of disappointment, the performance inherent in presenting yourself to someone new, and the sheer time. It is a form of emotional carnage.

Going on the apps is a bit like buying a lottery ticket, if you had to have a really miserable, awkward, sometimes traumatizing conversation with the bodega guy each time you bought one. Sure, sometimes you just need a hit of hope and you’re willing to put up with the bullshit, and sometimes maybe it’s even an amusing conversation. But you can’t buy that ticket everyday, it’s just not worth it.

I’m not a total cynic. After almost ten years on the apps, I actually met my now-partner on Tinder. Despite the volumes of advice available for single women, it was mostly luck and odds—the kind of luck made possible by going back to the slot machine each day, a simple numbers game—and a little bit of skill. I’d gotten so good at swiping I was like a professional thrifter walking into a GoodWill; within seconds I could spot anything of value. The moment I saw this man’s image on my screen, I knew he was new to the game. Most of his photos were full-length shots and he was smiling gently, sometimes widely, almost posing (these were not mirror photos; someone else had taken them), but clearly very uncomfortable with it all. It was as if he was committed to showing the viewer who he was in full, putting his own discomfort and embarrassment aside in order to represent himself completely. It was incredibly endearing.

When, the first night we messaged, he suggested a phone call—me, pulling up my Google Cal and him confused, asking if now was okay—there was no doubt in my mind that I had to snatch this man up before he got corrupted by the dating apps. We talked for an hour, scheduled a date for two days later, and before that first date ended, he asked when he could see me again. It was all so easy, so cordial, so nice.

Turns out, I was right. He’d just joined the apps—Tinder was the only one he’d heard of, so that’s what he signed up for—after his wife had asked for a divorce. Obviously, this inserted a whole new set of issues (dating in one’s 40s is never blue skies and green grass) but these new ex-wife related problems almost felt sweet, or at least adult compared to the avoidance, awkwardness, childish games I’d grown accustomed to. It wasn’t only his propensity for commitment that drew me in, spending time together was fun and easy and almost freakishly comfortable. He had no desire to endlessly search for the best option. He had not yet been indoctrinated into dating app culture.

Problem was, I had. The first time we fought, I was certain we would and should break up. If something wasn’t perfect, I was ready to jump ship, walls up, see you later. Ben is flawed in many ways, but in the ways of relationships, he shines. He was patient and communicative and we talked it through—nothing’s perfect, he reminded me. Some things take work.

It’s been four years. We live together. I’m a stepmom to his incredible son and we’re happy. It’s great to have a fully committed partner, someone who is invested in seeing and caring for you, in growing together—something I had never experienced in my adult life. But if we broke up, would I go back on the dating apps? Probably not? It feels a little like hiking to the top of a mountain. I saw it! It’s beautiful! I have no intention of leaving. But if the mountain started to shake and I fell back down, would I climb back up? Not if that climb consisted of the dating apps we have available to us and the men my age on them, especially in this particular political climate where men feel emboldened in the worst ways and most hetero partnerships are objectively unequal. There is so much sewage to wade through, not the people themselves, but the mentality the apps foster.

Partnership can be great. Especially in our very heteronormative culture, there is no denying that being in partnership (unless it’s abusive, of course) greases the wheels of everyday living, especially if you’ve never had the luxuries of that specific kind of emotional, financial, and physical support. But the alternative, being a single woman on my own as I was for most of my adult life, was also pretty nice when I was able to ignore the annoying feeling that something was fundamentally wrong with me. With everything, you have to calculate if the time is worth the reward. There’s a reason we’re not all running around the beach with metal detectors trying to find gold. We’re at a point with online dating, I’m afraid, where the time and effort is simply not worth the potential reward for many women.

I’m an entrepreneur at heart so I’d like to believe someone will come up with a new solution that fosters a more human approach to connection and market forces will shuffle it to the top. But I’m afraid our systems are too broken and we’ve taken capitalism too far. What rises to the top now are the solutions that best exploit our worst and most animalistic instincts, the designs that foster pleasure by way of addiction, not connection, leading to our own spiritual and psychological demise. We don’t need an app, we need a cultural overhaul. Maybe decades from now we’ll learn our lesson and the market will correct itself (look at the resurgence of non-alcoholic beer!). But for now, given the options, it makes total sense for women to opt out.